Ghent, Belgium, 29 December 2025. Alice, an AI platform built by lawyers for lawyers and legal teams, has raised €1 million in pre-seed funding to rethink legal casework from end to end. The round was led by NewSchool and Seeder Fund, with participation from a group of experienced Belgian angel investors.
When unchecked AI meets the courtroom
AI adoption in legal practice is accelerating, but so are the risks. Courts in multiple jurisdictions are increasingly encountering legal submissions that reference fabricated or incorrect sources, often the result of unverified outputs from general-purpose AI tools.
In Belgium, judges have already intervened several times in the past months in such cases, including reopening proceedings and considering or imposing procedural sanctions. Internationally, similar rulings have begun to set precedents.
Alice is built to address this problem at its root: by embedding AI directly into professional legal workflows where verification, traceability, and human control are non-negotiable.
One workflow, built around the case file
Rather than a collection of standalone AI features, Alice is designed as one continuous workflow, where the output of each step directly feeds the next. This mirrors how legal casework universally unfolds. From analysis of the case documents to research of the legal principles, from research to argumentation, and from argumentation to letters and court-ready documents, covering the full end-to-end case chain in a single intuitive flow.
The platform replaces fragmented prompts and disconnected tools with an integrated, case-first approach, designed for how legal work actually happens: iteratively, under time pressure, and with high accountability.
Built from the courtroom up
Alice was launched in June 2025 by practising lawyers Jeroen Villé and Armin Wintein, who previously built two law firms: Leeward, a niche firm focused on transport and logistics law, and Winston, a unique full-service firm operating with fixed fees. CTO Joren Coulier brings experience building legal ERP systems.
This background shapes Alice’s product philosophy: technology follows legal practice, not the other way around. The platform is designed to be intuitive and accessible across law firms and legal teams and is not limited to AI specialists.
Early traction powering European growth
Alice is based in Ghent, a city that has become an increasingly active hub for scale-ups in software and AI. Its strong technical talent base and close ties between academia, industry, and professional services have provided a solid environment for building and validating a legal tech platform designed for European markets.
After only a couple of months of being operational, Alice is already in active use at more than 60 law firms across Belgium, an unusually fast adoption rate in a traditionally conservative sector. According to the founders, this validates demand for AI tools designed explicitly around legal accountability and professional standards.
With this pre-seed funding, led by NewSchool and Seeder Fund with participation from a group of experienced Belgian angel investors, Alice will now accelerate the development of its core legal workflow, further strengthening how lawyers move from analysis and research to argumentation and document generation. The investment will also support the expansion of the team and customer support operations, while enabling Alice to scale geographically, starting with Belgium as its home market before expanding into the Netherlands and France.
Jeroen Villé, co-founder and CEO of Alice:
“We are convinced that AI will only have a lasting place in legal practice if lawyers can fully trust it and when it covers all aspects of a case. Alice is built to help legal teams work faster and more consistently, without the risks of hallucinations and without losing control over their cases.”
Isabelle Tennstedt, Partner at Seeder Fund:
“Alice solves one of the biggest blockers in legal AI: trust. Built by lawyers and already adopted by law firms, the platform aligns AI innovation with the realities of legal practice. That is why we strongly believe in the future of Alice.”
For more information, or interview requests: Jeroen Villé, CEO, jeroen@alice.law, +32 474 57 59 53
About Alice
Alice is a Belgian AI platform for lawyers and legal teams. It supports daily legal casework through a single integrated workflow, from analysis and research to argumentation and document generation, with lawyers firmly in control. To learn more, visit www.alice.law and follow the company on LinkedIn.
The Legal Wire spoke with Alice CEO, Jeroen, to find out more.
TLW: You’ve framed trust not as a feature but as something that needs to be embedded directly into a lawyer’s workflow. In practice, what does “trustworthy AI” mean when dealing with real case files, deadlines, and high accountability, and where have you seen other legal AI tools struggle to meet that standard?
Jeroen: “For us, “trustworthy AI” in dispute resolution means three things: (1) grounded outputs anchored in the actual case file and the relevant legal sources (legislation, case law, and doctrine), (2) traceability and verifiability so a lawyer can see why something is said and where it comes from, and (3) controllability so the lawyer can steer the reasoning and the tone rather than accept a black box. Where many legal AI tools struggle is that they’re either chat-first (strong at generating text, weaker at staying anchored in the file), too generic (not built around dispute workflows), or insufficiently source-aware (they mix in unvetted retrieval or produce outputs without clear sourcing, which can lead to “sounds right” reasoning and unreliable citations).”
TLW: Legal remains a cautious profession when it comes to adopting new technology, especially AI. When Alice is introduced to a firm for the first time, what tends to be the real deciding factor that gets lawyers using it in live matters rather than just trying it in the background?
Jeroen: “Alice tends to feel immediately familiar because the workflow mirrors how dispute lawyers already work day to day. From understanding the file to targeted research, argument building, and drafting. When it fits their natural process and delivers an early, tangible win (structure, timeline, key issues, a first draft aligned with the case posture), it stops being “something to try” and becomes part of the live matter workflow.
Just as important is confidence and control: lawyers start using Alice on live matters when they feel they can verify the output quickly, trace it back to the case file, and stay fully in control of the final work product.”
TLW: Beyond trust, what feedback or user behaviour has surprised you most since launch and what does that tell you about how lawyers actually want to work with AI?
Jeroen: “Our lawyers want AI less as a magic button and more as a reasoning and workflow partner, something that helps them think faster, stay organised, and move from documents to defensible arguments with confidence.”
TLW: As Alice expands into new jurisdictions, how do you see the product evolving? Do you want it to become more of a research assistant, a drafting tool, or the central system lawyers rely on to structure and reason through their cases from start to finish?
Jeroen: “We don’t see it as a choice between analysis, research or drafting. The ambition is for Alice to become the central case workflow for dispute lawyers, the system they rely on to get to know the case, reason through the issues, run targeted research, build arguments, and draft the key documents end-to-end.
As we expand into new jurisdictions, the product evolves mainly through local legal sources, procedural conventions, and drafting styles, while keeping the same core workflow. In other words: jurisdiction-specific substance on top of a workflow that already matches how litigation teams work in practice.”
